DH

Diana Hu

Group Partner at Y Combinator

San Francisco Bay Area

Overview 

Diana Hu is a Group Partner at Y Combinator, with previous roles including Director of Engineering at Niantic, Inc. and Co-founder & CTO at Escher Reality. She holds an MS and BS from Carnegie Mellon University, and has invested in various early-stage companies in sectors like AR/VR and AI. Diana's career highlights include leading engineering teams at Niantic and founding a successful startup that was later acquired, showcasing her expertise in technology innovation and entrepreneurship. As a Group Partner at Y Combinator, she continues to leverage her technical skills and industry knowledge to support and invest in emerging startups in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Work Experience 

  • Group Partner

    2022 - Current

  • Visiting Partner

    2021 - 2022

  • Director of Engineering, Head of AR Platform

    2018 - 2020

    Led Niantic's AR platform

Niantic develops reality platforms that focus on mapping and security for current and future AR hardware generations.

Raised $770,000,000.00 from ID8 Investments, Pure Imagination Brands and Coatue.

  • Co-founder & CTO (acquired by Niantic)

    2016 - 2018

    Built the most advanced Augmented Reality API A Y Combinator S17 company

  • Data Science Lead (OnCue TV acquired by Verizon Labs)

    2014 - 2016

    Led ML and CV group for recommender systems and automatic TV ad detection

  • Data Science Tech Lead

    2013 - 2014

    Led data science for Intel's spin-off for OnCue TV

  • Research Analyst for the Chief of Product

    2012 - 2013

    3rd engineering leadership rotation – executive briefings, white papers, keynotes

  • Research Engineer at Intel Labs

    2012 - 2012

    2nd engineering leadership rotation – large scale ML distributed systems and HPC

  • Software Engineer

    2011 - 2012

    1st engineering leadership rotation – computer vision applications for factory automation

An ecosystem of software & hardware vendors, integrators and solution providers focused on adoption of NFV and SDN-based solutions.

  • Researcher

    2010 - 2011

    Computer vision research on biometrics

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